June 26, 2019

The first weekend of June was the new moon(actually it was on Monday) so it was time to go out and get some Milky Way shots. It was cloudy by the coast and there were thunder storms in the mountains so a photographer friend(the guy who organizes our Meetups) asked if I wanted to join him on a Milky Way shoot in Joshua Tree. I had wanted to shoot there since I shot there with the Meetup group 2 years ago. He said I should bring my girls(furbabies) along for the ride. Google said when we left that the journey would take 2 hours and 40 minutes. After a stop to gas up and some pit stops for the girls and myself, this turned into 3 and ½ hours. My fellow photographer and I got separated so I headed to where we shot in July of 2017 where there’s a rock that I call the ‘Fuck You’ rock. It’s got a bit of a portion sticking up like a middle finger. My minimum goal was to shoot 2 shots: a star trail looking north and a time lapse of the Milky Way rising over the hills to the east.

4 / 4

The Galactic Core rising above the desert.

The Milky Way and the ‘Fuck You’ rock. You can see the rock in the foreground just right of center. This was the last shot(or shots) I took and didn’t go as planned. The plan was to shoot about 5 minutes of the sky(multiple shots to stack later) and the shoot a long exposure of the foreground that I’d light paint with my pretty strong headlamp. The headlamp didn’t work. So I ended up using a portion of a blue hour panorama I’d shot earlier and had to place the foreground a bit higher in the sky to cover up a Joshua Tree. The bright ‘star’ just right of center is Jupiter and you see the Dark Horse(with it’s Pipe and Snake sub-nebula) straddling Jupiter. The yellowish star just to the right of Jupiter is Antares and it’s bright nebula.

Joshua Tree Location